Ten more years

How has summer been for you this year? With only a few weeks left before the days shorten and the nights become colder it seems it’s been quite a benign season. After a late, hot start to the rains they came down in pleasing bucket-loads over Gauteng in November and December, making this year’s rainfall total so far very much better than it was predicted to be last year. And, thankfully, rains have fallen in many other parts of the country, too, filling hitherto dry dams and alleviating what was becoming a drought disaster in many areas. Other areas, admittedly, have not been so lucky. For us in Gauteng, however, things currently seem quite good, climate-wise. Our fields are green, our dams full, butterflies abound and those of us who have to feed livestock should have no difficulty in buying in fodder at reasonable prices as the grass cutting season hasn’t been bad at all. So much so that one might be lulled into a sense that the hullabaloo about climate change and global warming might be a bit exaggerated, or even, simply, “fake news.” Well, if that’s your view, time for a reality check. If you continue to live your current comfortably hydro-carbon-fueled, plastic consuming, meat-eating life you have ten years before it all goes horribly pear-shaped. Although the actual shape of that pear is not fully clear, it will involve extreme weather (drought, flood, cyclones, heat etc), possible food shortages, certain water shortages and other disruptions which will make Eskom’s inability to supply uninterrupted electricity pale into insignificance. Ten years to the tipping point. That’s the view of a group of scientists and researchers who published their findings and conclusions in a report titled Our Future on Earth 2020 last month. You can view it by clicking here. It’s scary stuff to have such a shortened horizon ~ ten years is, after all, a lot shorter than 20 (the number of years we have been publishing this magazine) or “by 2050,” the last scientific estimate of the tipping point (itself only 30 years hence). In the report,the researchers lay out in clear, layman’s terms, the current state of affairs, across the entire gamut of the climate emergency, covering environmental, socio-economic, political and technological factors, among others. The current state of play is laid out very starkly in two pages of graphics. On page 11 is a set of 24 graphs showing changes in trends in two areas ~ socio-economic and “earth systems”, from 1960 to the present. Have a look at them, even if you don’t read the entire report. Then turn to page 63 and view the graph on the number of species extinctions since 1500. But the researchers also give some guidelines as to what they believe can be done, if not to move the planet and its inhabitants away from the climate crisis totally then at least to extend the ten-year horizon by a few decades. What does this “tipping point” mean? It is the term scientists have coined to describe the point at which increasing global temperatures caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide will start to uncontrollably feed off themselves. In other words, the point at which we will have lost the ability to prevent the planet from self-combusting. Thus, it is a man-made construct, rather than an empirically-proven certainty. Because we’ve never been in this situation before as a species (that we know of, anyway), it is simply the scientists’ best-guess that a global average temperature increase of 1,5oC is the level higher than which self-generating heat increases will begin. It could be higher, or it could be lower. Is a ten-year horizon important? And what will happen in ten years’ time? The short answers to both those questions is “no” and “nothing”. No, a ten-year horizon to the tipping point is not important because we have absolutely no way of achieving the necessary cut-backs in carbon emissions to maintain the average global temperature increase to the holy grail of 1,5oC. Because to do so would require us all to instantly stop driving, flying, consuming and eating meat. And that simply isn’t going to happen, particularly with climate denialists such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro (among many others) in charge of their respective countries, not to mention the ANC in charge here, with its dismal record of environmental care. And what will happen in ten (or 20) years? Nothing. At least nothing that isn’t happening already, although it will simply be on an ever-increasing, more violent and terrifying scale. There will be fires, there will be floods, there will be famine, there will be death, and there will be mass migrations of people on a scale that makes the current waves of refugees pouring across borders worldwide look like a trickle. There will be riots, and war, over food shortages, and over water. So, more of the same, really. Only worse.